Gypsy reviewed in Locus Magazine

To examine the forty-year-long bibliography of Carter Scholz at ISFDB is to dream of alternate timelines. First, a continuum where, perhaps, circumstances—interior and exterior to the author—allowed Scholz to produce a far greater amount of fiction than the modestly substantial amount on display. But also we can imagine a timeline where this exact same CV in all its glory has drawn the notice of myriad critics and fans, and thus elevated Scholz to the stratosphere of literary acclaim due to his grace, sophistication, and unflinchingly bravura storytelling.

But, alas, our genre is full of unsung geniuses—at least, unsung in the mainstream world. R. A. Lafferty, David Bunch, Avram Davidson, Carol Emshwiller, where are your laurels? If Scholz is keeping company with these illustrious peers and forebears, he is already in as magnificent a legion as any writer could want.

Scholz’s new book—a short novel, two stories, an essay, and an interview—appears from PM Press, a publisher with a progressive slant who has been dipping a toe into science fiction under the auspices of curator Terry Bisson. They’ve published Le Guin, John Shirley, Eleanor Arnason, Rudy Rucker, Karen Joy Fowler, and the VanderMeers, among others, so Scholz shares eminent stablemates.

Gypsy is the tale of a meticulously rendered but kludgy slower-than-light starship fleeing a systems-crashing totalitarian Earth. As that synopsis might foreshadow, the tale is not a barrel of laughs. To cut to the chase, the starship mission fails. Or does it? Scholz gives us a devastating tale where an admirable, almost superhuman heroism does not result in a clear-cut victory—or any conventional victory at all—but rather in a spiritual or symbolical triumph amidst ashes, rendered all the more laudable by a kind of defiant, Battle of Thermopylae stubbornness and clarity of purpose.

We start out with a devastating portrait of our planet, ecological and cultural, circa the 2040s. All the harshest physical and sociopolitical trends we can see in 2015 have been accelerated and pushed to the max. Even the invention of clean practical fusion power has been subverted and denied. The Earth and human civilization seems to be circling the drain. “Its failures, its cruelties, its grandeurs, its aspirations—all extirpated to the root, in a fury of self-loathing that fed on what it destroyed.”

Now, you can argue whether this is a likely future or not. But you cannot argue with the forcefulness and almost cyberpunkian ingenuity with which Scholz builds this future. In minute detail, he illustrates all our “poison poetry of ruin and catastrophe and longing.” Fittingly for a writer who came of age in the 1970s, he harks back to the great quartet of doomsday novels by John Brunner. But he layers on four additional decades of bad news and disappointments.

Having established this background, he foregrounds scientist Roger Fry and his sixteen compatriots. These are the core plotters who want to build, with stolen materials, and to launch, all in secret, the starship Gypsy to Alpha Centauri. (Shades of another Seventies icon, Jefferson Starship’s Blows Against the Empire.) Our point of view lies mainly onboard the failing ship as a succession of “stewards” are awakened from cold sleep during crisis points in the ship’s 80-year-plus journey. These travelers are particularized with an incredible depth of character seldom found in most science fiction. And despite plot-addicted naysayers among fandom, such deep persona-building is hardly wasted effort, as each starfarer’s nature determines how they handle each crisis. And we get similar treatment of Fry, who we learn early on has been captured by the authorities and left behind when Gypsy takes off.

Ultimately, in an unforeseen ending, the efforts of the Gypsy and crew are proven to amount to that of a beacon guttering into extinction while having done its job of both lighting the ship of Earth to safe harbor and also thumbing its nose at the dominant paradigm of greed and indifference and materialistic anhedonia that has wrought so much ill over the past several centuries. A “tiny splinter of human will forge through vast, uncaring space.”

Obviously, this book stands in dialogue with such recent novels as Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora and Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves, and with Barry Malzberg’s classic Galaxies. But much starker and existential even than those, it is primarily an anti-space-opera, if you will, a charnel-ground meditation on what lies at the end of all efforts.

Following this knockout story, the shorter works agreeably extend our feel for Scholz’s talents without necessarily magnifying his scope.

“The Nine Billion Names of God” is an epistolary metatextual tale about an SF writer with a manic idea. It references Borges explicitly, and lives up to that high standard. “Bad Pennies” is told adroitly in the form a Congressional interrogation, and reads like the economic SF of Mack Reynolds as filtered through the modernist sensibilities of William Gaddis. This is a Good Thing.

The essay on “The United States of Impunity” offers a by-now-all-too-familiar chronicle of the major missteps taken by our government and corporate citizens since 9/11. Impassioned yet somewhat predictable at this late date, it would benefit from an extension that looked at matters, for good or ill, after 2008.

Finally, the happy, playful dialogue between Bisson and Scholz reveals a writer at ease with himself and the world, still casting about for new themes and topics and techniques after his masterly achievements.

This world of ours might not be the one where Scholz had his ideal career. But it is the one world we can be certain is lucky enough to have him around.

Paul Di Filippo has been writing professionally for over thirty years, and has published almost that number of books. He lives in Providence, RI, with his mate of an even greater number of years, Deborah Newton.

Jewish Noir Reviewed in The Big Click

There’s been a glut of Jewish-themed books lately, especially in YA, ones that seem to wear Jewish-ness as a trapping, as much an accessory as the novel having the love interest be a vampire, neither conscious of nor caring for the very real and living culture and traditions. So when I saw Jewish Noir,my first thought was all right, what the hell have I got to complain about now?

As it turns out, nothing. It’s a solid collection from a wide range of writers, most more-or-less writing from a uniquely Jewish perspective. Crime? Yeah, there’s a lot of crime, a lot of hard time and short luck all thematically enmeshed into Jewish roots. The particular focus of the collection, which despite my initial skepticism, I enjoyed, never felt unnecessary, but provided a commonality between the wildly different voices that flowed well throughout. Like most anthologies, a couple of the stories towards the middle felt like filler, but several — perhaps most notably in the first story in the collection, R.S. Brenner’s “Devil for a Witch”— ended on neatly executed little screwturn gut-punches, which is the kind of feeling I look for in a noir.

Like the editor says, if you’re looking for the hardboiled, the rootless, the persecuted and the cornered, you don’t have to look much further than the Jews, so what better thematic match could there be?

Jewish Noir Reviewed on New York Journal of Books

Jewish Noir isn’t for the faint-hearted nor is it for the typical noir fan, and not due to the Judaic symbolism, mythology, or history, but rather because Jewish noir, as it is defined by editor Kenneth Wishnia through the short stories he collects in this anthology, is not the typical detective and damsel-in-distress trope readers may expect.

Wishnia has gathered diverse writers to create a dark and bitter selection of short stories featuring Jewish tropes, themes, and characters. Not all the stories deal with the Holocaust, like “Feeding the Crocodile” by Moe Prager, and those that can do so in surprising ways, such as “Blood Diamonds” by Melissa Yi. Most of the short stories in this collection are appearing for the first time. There is a wide variety to the stories from that of the misunderstood professor who holds out for his integrity but snaps, to the magical realist “The Golem of Jericho” in which a golem may or may not have been behind some murders.

Truly, the majority of these stories are dark and disturbing on a psychological level. Fans of horror may enjoy this new genre, and a reader doesn’t need to be Jewish to enjoy the tales within, though some understanding of Judaism and its mythology may help make the stories resonate more with their symbolism and references.

- See more at: http://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/jewish-noir#sthash.mMYTGjLP.dpuf

Damnificados reviewed on Helios

JJ Amaworo Wilson’s Damnificados is based on real events, which seems almost incredible until you remember what a truly strange world we live in. These are the facts of the real-life story: In 1990 constuction began on an enormous skyscraper in Caracas, Venezuela, the Centro Financiero Confinanzas (more commonly referred to as the Tower of David). In 1994 Venezuela was hit by a banking crisis and construction on the tower halted, never to be resumed. Beginning in 2007 the half-completed tower, which is the third tallest in the city and the seventh tallest in all of South America, became occupied by homeless squatters, and eventually as many as 2,500 people lived in the building. They rigged up electricity and running water and set up businesses in the building. Contrary to popular perception, the building was far from a war zone. It was a functional city within a city, forgotten people reclaiming a forgotten relic of civilization. In the last year the government has relocated most of these tenants to new housing, and plans are being explored for how best to use the hulking structure. It is unlikely a better use will be found than free housing for a couple thousand homeless people.

Wilson takes this bizarre real-life story and molds it into a compelling fable about the collision between the haves and the have-nots in a fictional South American city. In Damnificados (the Spanish word for victims, most commonly victims of disaster) we follow the efforts of Nacho Morales, the physically disabled leader of a band of homeless outcasts. Nacho is brilliant–he knows a dozen languages and scrapes together a living doing translation work, though he could make far more if he was willing to abandon the ragged families who need him most. He is not willing to do this. He chooses poverty because to do otherwise would be to side with oppression; those with power and money in this city use it only to gain more, regardless of whom they trample in the process.

The book starts with Nacho leading his band of outsiders into the tower. We get our first taste of the book’s use of magical realism when the group discovers the tower’s first floor is currently being occupied by a pack of wolves, and the leader of the pack has two heads. They drug the wolves and relocate them and then begin turning the tower into a home. Nacho starts a school and teaches children and adults to read. Maria, a former beauty queen, starts a salon. A few brothers start a bakery. Nacho uses one of his contacts to get water to the building and has a homeless electrical engineer connect the tower to the city’s electrical grid. Word spreads and more and more homeless families come to the tower. Word also spreads to individuals who don’t like the idea of homeless folks taking over a rich man’s tower for free.

The tower was originally built by a man named Torres (the Spanish word for towers). The land it was built on was once the city’s trash dump, and it was occupied by thousands of poor families who were subsequently displaced when Torres decided to build his tower. He ran out of money and never finished the hulking building, and Nacho feels he is reclaiming land that belongs to the poor by taking over the abandoned structure. The Torres family, disinterested in the tower for decades since construction ceased, feels differently. Violence is threatened and violence is enacted. Prayers are offered and miracles occur. Magical realism plays a significant role in the book, and strange events take place. For the most part these integrate well with the realism of the story, though there are a few times when these feel like deus ex machina that retrieve the novel from a narrative dead end. However, given the parable-like feel of the novel, these never derail our investment in the book.

Wilson’s novel is an invigorating tale about human beings clinging by their fingertips not only to a sustainable way of life, but to their very dignity, and shouting back at the wealthy with what breath they have, proclaiming they will not be ignored or silently pushed aside. The novel is delightfully imaginative and cuttingly insightful. If Gabriel García Márquez wrote a politically-revolutionary novel with dystopian overtones and published it through an indie press, it would be something like this. That is a compliment. Damnificados is engaging, provocative, and wholly original.

David Nilsen is the editor and lead critic for Fourth & Sycamore and works at Greenville Public Library. He is a member of the National Book Critics Circle. You can find more of his writing on his website and follow him on Twitter.

Damnificados on The Discerning Reader

Damnificados is loosely based on the real-life occupation of a half-completed skyscraper in Caracas, Venezuela, the Tower of David. In this fictional version, 600 “damnificados”—vagabonds and misfits—take over an abandoned urban tower and set up a community complete with schools, stores, beauty salons, bakeries, and a rag-tag defensive militia. Their always heroic (and often hilarious) struggle for survival and dignity pits them against corrupt police, the brutal military, and the tyrannical “owners.” Taking place in an unnamed country at an unspecified time, the novel has elements of magical realism: avenging wolves, biblical floods, massacres involving multilingual ghosts, arrow showers falling to the tune of Beethoven’s Ninth, and a trash truck acting as a Trojan horse.

Wilson demonstrates inventiveness with his dynamic characters. Magical realism plays an important part, as well as smart satire in the very clever narrative providing twists and turns when least expected – two-headed wolves, rescuing dragonflies, floods. Belonging, loss and love play a vital part among the colorful cast, the damificados might be fractured, certainly not broken.

The plot focuses on the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’, privileged and burdened, power and politics. The outcasts struggle for dignity and a home in an abandoned skyscraper – which I found very symbolic.

A colorful landscape gives this book a boost of beauty – a wide variety of people coming together, working together despite their varying backgrounds and circumstances. Differences aside they form a team, an extended family of sorts in concert to fight for a mutual cause.

Wilson’s innovativeness really comes alive, a poignant tale, strong messages carried throughout the characters and narrative. Looking forward to more from this talented author.

The Madness of Reason

Europe. Waves of immigrants and refugees are being forced to move against their will. Many end up without documentation. Consequently, they cannot work legally and are subject to arrest for not having any documentation. Politicians in numerous countries pass legislation making it impossible for most refugees to obtain legal documents and authorizing their police forces to arrest undocumented residents. Many of those arrested end up in prison or in detention camps especially set up for these refugees.

Vigilante gangs stirred up by nativist and fascist organizations attack and beat those they consider the Other. Hardly anybody defends or protects those who are attacked, fearing their own status and the police. Meanwhile, regional wars slowly turn into proxy wars for different imperial alliances, creating even more refugees. In addition, laws based against the free movement of people from certain ethnicities and religions become more pointed and harsh. The fear of a world war increases with each day.

Now, imagine you are an adolescent boy whose parents sent you out of the country because they feared for your freedom and safety. You end up staying with relatives in Paris for a while, constantly hoping for a permanent refugee visa while doing odd jobs and occasional longer term work. Your life is uncertain, but adventurous as you meet street characters, left wing organizers, girls, and others. You stay in touch with news about your parents and sister back in the country you left—a Germany becoming more and more unfriendly to everyone but those they consider pure German. After a run of bad luck, you hear your family has been removed from their home and sent off. This puts you over the edge, so you go to the German consulate in Paris and kill a German official. You sit quietly until the police come.

This is the premise of author Joseph Matthews’ latest novel, Everyone Has Their Reasons. Utilizing the Paris assassination of a German embassy official named vom Rath on November 7, 1938 by a 17-year old displaced Polish-German Jew that was manipulated by the Nazis into the German Kristallnacht, Matthews addresses issues of identity, immigration, anti-Semitism, nationalism, and collective punishment. The young assassin, named Herschel Gryntzmyn, is the narrator and protagonist. He tells his story of a life in the Paris underworld in the 1930s via a series of letters to an attorney appointed to him by the German government. The letters are written while he sits in prison awaiting his trial. They discuss his friendships, his exile, his means of survival and his discoveries.

There is a section of Thomas Pynchon’s masterwork Gravity’s Rainbow titled “In the Zone.” This section is a catalogue of perversion and deviance involving military men from all nations, black marketeers in everything from cocaine to flesh, arms dealers and child prostitutes of every gender; the transactions and experiences are undertaken in an atmosphere defined by the despair, desperation and just plain evil of total war. The underlying truth of this section is that war unleashes the worst attributes of humanity, making what was once forbidden common. Evil wins the moment. Everything is for sale. In a more light-hearted manner, Joseph Heller provides the reader with his character Milo Minderbinder, who makes money off of everything in the war and sells to all sides in the conflict.

Although Pynchon’s Zone seems to intentionally exaggerate the perversions of humanity, the world described in Herschel’s letters to his attorney is of a similar nature. He describes his experiences with pimps, cops on the take, prostitutes and porn dealers, and egocentric men whose only interest is in maintaining their pleasure, whether it is money or flesh. Herschel, in a manner similar to Pynchon’s protagonist Slothrop, is an innocent adrift, manipulated by powers beyond his control and understanding. In what is his most decisive attempt to take control of some aspect of his life, he kills the German consulate official. In so doing, he ends up losing any control at all; his world is forever controlled by the military, the politicians and the courts.

Everyone Has Their Reasons is a novel drawn from the modern human condition. Authoritarian politicians and fearful citizens combine to create a world where those denoted as scapegoats are made to pay for humanity’s trespasses. It is also a tale of survival and human dignity. Joseph Matthews has created a powerful narrative of a tragically human scenario. It is at turns warm, comedic, compelling, and provocative. Unfortunately, it is also all too contemporary in the concerns it addresses.

Ron Jacobs is the author of Daydream Sunset: Sixties Counterculture in the Seventies published by CounterPunch Books. He lives in Vermont. He can be reached at: ronj1955@gmail.com.

Radical Doula Profiles: Alana Apfel

About Alana Apfel: I am a doula, writer and birth activist currently living in the UK. In Bristol where I live I am part of a collective of doulas offering sliding scale community birth work. I recently moved from California where I was part of the San Francisco General Doula Program and the Birthways center. Both programs provide volunteer doulas for people without means to pay. As an activist writer I gathered stories from doulas working within these organisations as well as the Bay Area Doula Project, BirthKeepers, Birth Justice Project and SQUAT. These contributions are featured in my forthcoming book Birth Work as Care Work: Stories from Activist Birth Communities published by PM Press in Spring of next year. More info can be found here.

What inspired you to become a doula? I was brought up by a family of healers, health activists and a mother who was a midwife. I was her fourth child born at home. I have always been taught that birthing women and others who give birth are strong powerful beings who are fully capable of doing so in their own way and on their own terms. This is never something I have doubted. This conviction directly shapes my doula practice today. The wonder of giving birth and supporting others through birth has always been with me. It is my legacy and my life’s passion.

Why do you identify with the term radical doula? Radical birth work for me begins with the recognition that birth, and actually all reproductive processes, are both deeply personal and highly politicised events. We cannot separete the “personal” from the “political” in birth. How we birth, and how we support others through birth, is a direct reflection of society’s politics.

Radical birth work also requires confronting systems of privilege that run throughout society. Some continue to benefit whilst others continue to be harmed. What is unique about doulas in this case, is that while we work (most often) within hospitals, we work for ourselves. This enables us to bring a degree of institutional critique to our practice. From this position birth workers avoid being “medicalized” leaving us with the potential to confront and redress institutional forms of violence that are inflicted upon reproductive and birthing bodies. A radical doula is a caregiver whose activism holds the ability to literally reimagine lifes beginnings.

What is your doula philosophy and how does it fit into your broader political beliefs? I recognise no “correct” way to give birth instead honoring the unique rhythms of each birth giver as they move through their own birthing process. Regardless of where or how you give birth – home, hospital, vaginal or c-section – every birth signifies a beautiful occurrence. Every birth giver and every kind of birth outcome deserves loving support and respect.

My sense is that we need to broaden the nature and language of care to incorporate a greater diversity of reproductive needs. Not everyone experiences their sexual and reproductive bodies in the same way. To subsume all birth givers within the same form of reproductive care is to erase individual identities and lived experiences. Birth workers hold space for others to discover their own inner potential, helping to facilitate, but never take charge of, the trials, joys and beauty that come from navigating one’s own reproductive journey.

What is your favorite thing about being a doula? Witnessing the immense, surreal and mystical power of all birth givers as they move through their own birth journey and emerge triumphant to hold the children they carried, nurtured and brought into this world, for the first time.

If you could change one thing about the experience of pregnancy and birth, what would it be? One problem with healthcare today is the framing of reproductive experiences as a matter of “choice.” This framework promotes a belief that the individual has full agency in decision making over their health whilst overlooking, and therefore masking, intersections of race, gender, sexuality, physical ability, citizenship and economics that differentially affect health outcomes and determine the quality and extent of care that is given. Economically disadvantaged communities, communities of colour, queer and gender nonconforming communities, in particular, bear the brunt of institutional forms of violence. Breaking cycles of oppression means directly engaging these systems in order to reimagine a language of birth that creates room for all birth givers to feel heard, affirmed and respected.

Urusla K. Le Guins Late in the Day Asks You to Put Down the Smartphone

Never before has a book so perfectly coincided with the circumstances of reading it than Late in the Day (PM Press, 112 pages, $18.95).

The new poetry collection from Portland author/hero Ursula K. Le Guin had been sitting on my desk for about a week when the Internet went down, someone borrowed my phone to make a call and suddenly I was distressingly deviceless and needed something immediately to occupy my brain and eyeballs.

"But here, in the midst of our orgy of being lords of creation, texting as we drive," Le Guin writes on the book's first page, "it's hard to put down the smartphone and stop looking for the next technofix."

"Fuck," I thought. "Is Ursula Le Guin watching me?"

But that's exactly what humans would think, that the whole thing is about them. Le Guin's poems are about the rocks, the creeks, the planets, the more-permanent-than-us furniture of the universe that looks still to us, but only because we're moving so quickly. Le Guin sees motion in everything and demands that we, too, look up from our phones and notice the details and histories of things, as she does in her poem "Salt": "The salt in the small bowl looks up at me/with all its little glittering eyes and says:/I am the dry sea./Your blood tastes of me."

Maybe it's a function of getting old, this reverence for the parts of nature that decay at a much slower rate than we do. But one could argue that the long view isn't new for Le Guin, whose work frequently involves the solid pieces of the world and the misty cover of myth.

Le Guin believes that poetry is the tool we need to repair our broken relationship with the physical world. "One way to stop seeing trees, or rivers, or hills as 'natural resources,'" she writes in her foreword, "is to class them as fellow beings—kinfolk."

Late in the Day intertwines our human stories with those of gnats and fireflies and stars and distant galaxies, in the hope that readers will look up, look out and see the world before, for them, it's gone.

"It will be dark in that night when/the deep basalt shifts and sighs,/headlands collapse, cliffs fail." she writes in "Geology of the Northwest Coast." "Then/the tumult of the seas returning./And silence./The slow drift of stars."

Jewish Noir Reviewed on Promoting Crime Fiction

This collection of thirty-three stories is well up to the standard set by the excellent noir series. It begins with a fascinating introduction by Wishnia, in which he tries to analyse what being Jewish means: a people whose name, Hebrew, comes from the word ebra meaning ‘to cross over’, or whose Egyptian glyph denotes ‘a people without a place’; a people whose religious books include the individual fighting against society; a people whose elders were lost in the Holocaust, and whose grandmothers still keep a bag packed, just in case they have to flee the next pogrom.

The book is divided into seven sections. All the stories were good, so I’ve picked out particular favourites to comment on. The first section, Bitter Herbs focuses on individuals caught up in the machinery of the modern world, and my favourite here was ‘Living Water’, B K Stevens’ wonderful satire on modern school assessment (there is a writer who’s suffered too many touchy-feely powerpoints). The satire was spot-on, and the ending totally unexpected. The Golden Land looks at the difficulties in assimilation into a new culture, and the stand-out for me here was ‘The Lost Pages of the books of Judith’, Kenneth Wishnia’s tale of young college boys fighting prejudice in the late 40s – a prejudice that cropped up horrifyingly often in other stories from the land of freedom and equal opportunities. Night and Fog looked at the noir motif of a cause doomed from the beginning, and my favourite here was Melissa Yi’s haunting Blood Diamonds, which traces the legacy of the Holocaust through three generations. The longer section L’dor v’dor (from generation to generation) looks at the noir motif of mortality and the passing of time; I particularly enjoyed Stephen Jay Schwartz’s gentle ‘Yahrzeit Candle’ which dealt with heart disease passing through a family, and the tough voice of Alan Orloff’s ‘One of Them’.

Suburban Sprawl opened with a wonderful monologue by Rabbi Adam D Fischer, parodying a mother’s talk about her daughter’s Bat Mitzvah, and continued with several tales of bullying.

Kaffee mit Schlock went for the ‘adrenaline-fueled gut punch of hardboiled pulp fiction’; I enjoyed the sting-in-the-tail story of a nurse and her patient, ‘Doc’s Oscar’ by Eddie Muller. The final section was Vintage Reprint, with an essay and short story from the 60s by Harlan Ellison, of a famous comedian returning to the small town that mistreated him as a child.

A wonderful collection of short stories with the bleakest, blackest of noir feel about them all. Highly recommended.

Mitchell Abidor interviewed on Bookslut

In March 1871, after France lost the war against Prussia, the French army was driven out of Paris, leaving the city in the control of the National Guard and its citizens who formed the Commune, a democratically elected council that held the power in the city for two months before it was crushed by the French Army.

As a unique example of people standing up against the establishment and seizing the power, the Paris Commune continues to be a point of reference for leftist movements, especially anarchists and Marxists.

At the same time it is also one of the saddest and most violent stories in French history, with thousands of civilians killed during the "Bloody Week" when the French army entered the city. Louise Michel, one of the "voices of the Commune," described it as "an immense abattoir where after eight days of slaughter, the hordes of flies over the mass graves put an end to the killings for they feared the plague."

In Voices of the Paris Commune, Mitchell Abidor assembled accounts of people who, in one way or another, took part in the Commune. The largest part of the book is composed of responses to a call for papers issued by the journal La Revue Blanche in 1897, asking participants to write about their role in the Commune and to share their views on it. Abidor dedicated the first part of the book to articles by journalist Jules Vallès written during the Commune, followed by scripts from debates in the Commune.

Abidor translates historical texts for the Marxist Internet Archive, and has published the following books among others: A Socialist History of the French Revolution by Jean Jaurès; Anarchists Never Surrender by Victor Serge; Death to Bourgeois Society, a collection of writing by and about the anarchist propagandists of the deed; Communards: The Paris Commune of 1871 as Told by Those Who Fought for It; and Emmanuel Bove's novella A Raskolnikoff.

This is your second book about the Paris Commune. What interests you about the Paris Commune? Why do you want people to listen to the voices from the Commune?

Though I've translated documents from all phases of left-wing activity in France, from Jean Meslier, the first great atheist -- who incidentally was a priest -- to the Maoist movement in the period after May '68, it's the French Revolution, the Commune and the individualist anarchists of the early twentieth century I love the most. With the Commune it's got to do with how remarkable it was that the people of Paris were actually able to establish their own government, one that functioned under constant bombardment and attack, and that they were able to maintain a democracy throughout it all, though it was, to be honest, slightly curtailed in its final days. But to see a marginalized people, the workers, and political opponent of the empire of Napoleon III, people who had been imprisoned and exiled just months before, be able to stand on their own is an impressive sight. But I also think that the Commune can serve as an example for us today. Not that the workers of New York are going to follow the Parisians and rise up and seize power, but as an alternative form of radical left, what the French philosopher Michel Onfray calls la gauche communarde, the Communard left. A left that doesn't follow behind infallible leaders, that has no canonic texts, and that preserves democracy. It's about time the Commune was restored to its true place in history.

La gauche communarde -- Is it just a term from Onfray, or is this a way many French leftists see themselves?

It's a term I've only heard from Onfray, but it certainly explains a current, one that needs to spread all over the world. With the death of the old structures of the left there needs to be some principle all can stand behind, and I really can't think of a better one than the notion of a Communard left, inspired by a whole city that stood up for the rights of the people while ensuring that all voices are freely heard.

You said that the book received more attention than you expected. Do you have ideas why there is a lot of interest in the Commune at the moment?

I think a lot of it has to do with the Occupy movement, which sparked an interest in movements that sprung up spontaneously to challenge those in power. If you look at it, there are two books other than mine that came out in 2015, Communal Luxury by Kristin Ross and Massacre by John Merriman, and given the timeline in publishing it seems safe to say that Occupy played a role in their gestation. In fact, Ross in her book talks about how the existence of the Occupy encampments led her to go back and examine the questions raised by the Commune. She goes no further than saying they share "resonances," but whenever I speak about the Commune, people try to tie them much more closely together. This, I think, is the falsest of false connections and I oppose it adamantly: the Commune was a real government, voted for by real voters in a real election with real departments that really managed a real city.

Occupy brought the issue of income inequality to the forefront, but in the end it was more a moral than a practical movement, and doesn't deserve to share the same page as the Commune.

In your introduction you say that the best accounts of the Commune are fictional. Why is that?

What makes writing historical accounts about it difficult? Has it to do with the Commune never having been able to fully develop its potential, which might make it more suitable for fiction?

The main historical account, that of P.O. Lissagaray, who was a participant, is one I never was able to warm up to. By the way, it was translated into English by Eleanor Marx, Karl's daughter. Perhaps the failing is in me. But the fictional accounts I chose, Jules Vallès's L'Insurgé and Jean Vautrin's The Cry of the People [Le Cri du peuple in original, trans. as The Voice of the People -- Ed.], are very particular kinds of fiction. Vallès was a member of the Commune and edited the most important of the Commune's newspapers, Le Cri du peuple: The Cry of the People. His novel, the third volume of a trilogy covering his childhood, his adolescence, and the Commune, is less a novel than a first person account of the events, but a first-person account by one of the great writers. Vautrin is a novelist of the left, and his book takes a cast of mainly working-class characters through the life of the Commune. He's clearly studied the writings of the time at great length, and the combination of this and his political sympathies makes The [Voice] of the People an exciting book.

Some of the problem with historical accounts is that the short life of the Commune, only 72 days, prevented it from doing all it would have, which is expressly why John Merriman's excellent Massacre concentrates mostly on the eradication of the Commune, the defeats that led to 20,000 dead. But what disappoints me in historical accounts is that writers come into them with their preconceived notions and don't let the Commune speak for itself. It's presented as anarchist, as a forerunner of Bolshevism, as a precursor of Occupy, and I find all of that simply wrong. My preference, in this and all my other books, is to simply let the participants explain their actions and then let the reader decide. I have my opinion, but I might very well not be right. So let the reader see what those who were there had to say.

How did you choose the texts you included in the book? Which were your criteria?

In my first book on the Commune, Communards, I chose memoirs by people from all ranges of political opinion within the Commune, which was really varied. There were neo-Jacobins, followers of the great August Blanqui, and members of the First International. Voices of the Paris Commune was meant as a kind of primer using first person accounts, so I chose a representative figure like Vallès, and to show that the Commune was a real government there's the minutes of a stormy discussion there in its final days about the execution of the hostages and the establishing of a Committee of Public Safety. But the heart of the book is a large selection of responses to questions about the Commune posed to Communards by the literary magazine La Revue Blanche in 1897. I wanted to show just how wide the diversity of opinion was among those who fought for it, answers to questions like "Could it have won?" and "What were its failings?" For us, nearly a century and a half later, this is an event that's all of a piece; for those who were there it was anything but that, and I thought it important to show how lively the debates were during its life and after its death.

How was it to translate political texts from two-and-a-half centuries ago? The English versions are all very accessible. Did you have to make difficult choices?

This is what I do, how I've chosen to spend my time, translating revolutionary texts from the mid-seventeenth century to the period after May '68 in France, as well as from particular movements in Argentina, Italy, Portugal, and the world of Esperanto. A friend in London made me my business card with my name and profession: "Militant Translator."

The only difficulty with the texts in Voices of the Paris Commune was limiting them. The selections from the discussion in La Revue Blanche, with the Communards looking back a quarter of a century later on the events, is just a fraction of the full discussion, and I wish I could have done the whole thing. In fact, it's inspired me to do a similar investigation of May '68 in France, which will be published in 2018, the fiftieth anniversary of the events.

Do you have a favorite character from the Commune?

Jules Vallès stands out for me as someone who was both revolutionary and a firm defender of democracy, insisting on the freedom of the press until the final day. But there are individual stories that particularly touch me. The saddest is probably that of the death of the elder of the Commune, Charles Delescluze. The Commune was the culmination of a lifetime of his political activity, and in its final days he walked to the Commune's outer barricades so he could examine the situation. While he was there, he was mocked by the National Guard, as if he was seeking to flee and leave the workers to die. He was devastated, and went back to his office. He sat there for a while, signed some orders, then stood up and left and, not saying a word to anyone, walked directly into enemy fire to be killed. If there was a more noble death in the history of the revolutionary movement I don't know what it was.

The political backgrounds of the Communards were quite diverse -- there were anarchists, Marxists, republicans. Was there a social vision for a state that was shared by all?

Anarchists were few, the movement not yet having really gained hold in France, aside from Proudhonians. Marxists, too, were pretty rare. Such as they were they were members of the First International and their faction within the Commune was called the Minority. They, in fact, fought against the majority, who were followers of Blanqui and various forms of neo-Jacobins, when the majority wanted to become more dictatorial and set up a Committee of Public Safety.

They even threatened to stop attending sessions of the Commune, but in the end they did.

But let me get back to the social vision of all the groups: every one of them wanted a republic, but a social republic, one that ensured a decent life and living for all, that wanted everyone -- well, every male, but who knows, with time they might have added women -- to have equal political rights and the ability to express their opinions, and wanted to remove any official involvement in religion. The Commune burned the guillotine, banned night work for bakers, suspended rent payments, freed goods held in the national pawn shop, did away with the standing army... It didn't have the time to implement specifically socialist measures, but they would have, since every current within it believed in equality and social justice. When elections were held for the Commune they happened throughout Paris even in the bourgeois quarters, and those elected from those areas chose not to sit, leaving the Commune unified at least on a general vision of society, though not on some of the specifics.

What is your stance on the fight between the minority and the majority in the Commune?

Though I understand the impulse behind the majority's drive to ensure the Commune's survival through the same measures the French Revolution had implemented, my sympathies are all with the minority. The majority was a prisoner of the schemas of 1792, the minority were admirers of the great Revolution, but feared falling into the mistakes that tarnished its image and caused it great harm.

Do you think the Commune had a chance at survival at all?

No, and as some of the veterans of the Commune who are in my book say, few of them did. This was a war between Paris and rural France -- indeed, the rest of France -- and even had the forces in Versailles led by Thiers not crushed the Commune, the Prussians would have stepped in and finished the job. This makes the Commune even more impressive: that they stood by their ideas and attempted all they did as the bombs were falling on their heads, while they were dead men on reprieve.

Women had no voting rights and very little opportunity to contribute to its politics. They were able to join the National Guard though, and many of the texts in the book mention women fighting on the barricades. I find it strange that women were accepted as soldiers in the army when they weren't even allowed to vote. I was wondering why there were many women who were so passionate about the Commune that they were ready to die for it even though they were excluded from all decision making.

Let's be clear: women fought but not as formal members of the National Guard, which was all male. They went to the barricades just as did so many workers out of uniform: to defend a government that was theirs, that granted even unmarried women the rights to benefits owed to their fallen male companions. Women established their own organizations, which were encouraged and supported by the Commune, and several of them, most importantly Louise Michel and Elisabeth Dmitrieff became emblematic figures. But women were also used as a negative symbol of the Commune, as the pétroleuses, the women who supposedly spread gas around the city and set it alight. The city burned, both as a result of being bombarded and also because it was consciously set on fire, though not by brigades of gas-wielding women. Putting the blame for this entirely on women was another way to demonize the Commune for unleashing a horde of savage Amazons, for upsetting the gender cart.

About women in the National Guard: That must be false information that got copy-pasted over the Internet, then, because I found it in more than one article.

They fought, but weren't formally in the National Guard. They served more as support staff and nurses, courageously so, doing it at the front lines, and dying courageously as well. I don't want to downplay the role of women, and the brave way they took up their roles can't be stressed strongly enough, but I think we have to stick with the historical truth and not make the Commune what it wasn't. But don't kick yourself over false information: it's all over the place, on the right and the left. This is why I think it's so important to read the original sources, and for me to make them available in English.

When I give talks about the Commune I usually start by saying that the Commune is a blank screen that every element of the left projects its refereed image onto. Let me give you a perfect example of how much wishful thinking goes into examining the Commune. Recently I was interviewed by an anarchist, who insisted that the Commune was more anarchist than not, and he gave as proof the fact that National Guard officers were elected, like in the anarchist armies of Spain during the Civil War. I read him an account of the election to a National Guard unit, of how workers were elected to leading positions (though quickly replaced by experienced soldiers), but then told him when the election took place: September 1870, five months before the Commune was even established! Elected officers were a National Guard thing, not a Commune thing, but if you look at what happened between March and May without looking at the context you can easily change the meaning of an act.

I was going to ask you about the pétroleuses. How did this rumor come to pass? Was it widely believed?

Not only was it widely believed, it's a notion that still has to be debunked today, though scholars have pretty much proved it false. After all, of the thousands of women put on trial after the crushing of the Commune, not a one was found guilty of setting any buildings on fire. That said, an official organization of Communard women did call for its members to stock up on rifles and petrol, but again, there's no indication that groups of women then set out to burn buildings like the Hôtel de Ville down.

The legend of the pétroleuses is part of the generally dark legend that grew up around the Commune, as an event of unimaginable savagery unleashed by barely human workers. With the pétroleuses was added the element of misogyny, Communard women being depicted as unnatural, bestial women burning down the very city they lived in. Their burning down the city joined the killing of the hostages -- around sixty victims -- as the image of the Commune in the public's eye, or at least the image the bourgeois press and writers projected. 20,000 workers killed by the forces of order? Never heard of it. Or they deserved it.

In which ways can the Commune serve as an example today?

In a direct sense, it's hard to say. It certainly isn't in the cards that the workers of any of the great cities of the world will be taking over their cities and running them as independent governments. It's really far more as an example of that alternative left I mentioned, one that doesn't fall into silly sectarianism that discounts people with differing views or who fail to follow a line laid out by Lenin in 1905 or Trotsky in 1936. And it's also one that responds to a country's own reality, not falling back on the dicta of long-dead authorities.

Are there social movements at the moment that carry the spirit of the Commune, or that you find otherwise inspiring?

I would say that Podemos in Spain, with its vision of a pluralist left and a more democratic country contains much of the spirit of the Commune. They reject social democracy, but also reject turning their backs on the daily reality, the quotidian sufferings of the people of Spain in the name of some kind of intellectual or doctrinal purity. The free debate within Podemos, its ability to take in all progressive points of view, is in the direct line of the Commune.

Why did you choose to end the book with a letter by General de Gallifet who says nothing but that he is unable to answer the questions about his role in the Commune and his opinions on it?

Gallifet was the man who completed the crushing of the Commune. I thought it was a dramatic way to close the discussion. Maybe I should have made that clearer. Maybe in a second edition...